La femme meurt en juillet, Mélanie Béliveau
Éditions
Mains Libres, 2022
Having had the good fortune of hearing Mélanie Béliveau read several times from her second collection, La femme meurt en juillet (The Woman Dies in July), I wanted to spend more time with the collection as a whole. Béliveau made herself vulnerable by writing about having breast cancer and being treated for it, and presented her vulnerability both as a person and as a physician who was forced to rely on others. As a listener, not yet a reader, I struggled not to hold back, not to hold her voice and the poems at a safe distance – I struggled not to engage in voyeurism. By sitting in a room, quietly, and listening, by sitting with her, by attempting to carry the moment and the months and life it held, I hoped I would be able to welcome these poems. Immediately, I wanted to read the poems by myself, in a different state of vulnerability. Not exposed to others’ gaze and view, not open to the destruction a response can wreak. Knowing that I wouldn’t fully hear or read the poems, I thought I could at least gain something if I sat with nothing but the words and their accumulation, until I could let them create an impression within me, until I could let the collection shift something in me, as the excerpts did. Certainly any book of poetry ought to do this, at least to some extent.
Instead of focusing on cancer, Béliveau writes about her body, her capacity to see it, her relation to it, to herself, to life. She has explained in many interviews that she did not write about cancer, or even about the possibility of death, but about the transformation they brought to her life.
As the site of cancer, and as the object of removal through mastectomy, her breasts take on a variety of meanings. First, literal: “I see death / my breast always on me / I’d like for it to be elsewhere” (je vois la mort / mon sein tout le temps sur moi / je voudrais qu’il soit ailleurs, 19). Also sore, or simply nude. And then they are qualified as more or less unreal: a ghost breast; inflatable replicas; one an elite sniper menacing the other; unknown; car rims; RoboCop; vacant; expropriated – and felt up, subject to wandering hands.
The allusions to sex are far from limited to mentions of the breast – indeed, the poems include, but do not describe, unsexy sex, sex where anger and fatigue hover, where a desperate search for life dominates. There’s a desire to be desired, one that is met but unfulfilled at the same time. Sometimes desire is brutally negated:
I passed through
the stained glass of your warm neck in
bloom
powdered my desire
everywhere
shattered my
orgasms, pluralized
you struck your
eyes into mine
I set the
operating table
j’ai traversé le
vitrail de ta nuque chaude fleurie
poudroyé mon désir
partout
fracassé mes
orgasmes au pluriel
tu t’es acharné
sur mes yeux
j’ai mis la table
d’opération (20)
In this poem, we see the percussive effect of the writing, which at once carries anger and holds it back; we see the immense metaphors that allude to all that is unreachable, unattainable. The violence rises from passing through, to powdering or dusting, shattering (but say: fra-ca-sser, feel how hard it feels in your mouth), and finally striking (but think: s’acharner, striking over and over, getting into the flesh, chair). This crescendo takes what might be lovely moment of eyes locking into eyes during sex into a refusal to look at anything but the eyes: a moment of shared desperation and impossible proximity. La femme meurt en juillet is full of moments like this, full of the tragedy of uncertain transformations and (self-)destruction (and here I use tragedy in the strong sense of a force which cannot be controlled and dooms those who suffer from its action, not something that is merely incredibly sad). A few pages further, the hope of abandon through sex meets the reality of pain. Without pointing to a divide in the couple, Béliveau shows the conflict between sexual desire and the need for comfort and a different kind of intimacy, both within herself and between her and her partner: “love or sex / the sign can’t be read from here” (amour ou sexe / la pancarte n’est pas lisible d’ici, 84).
A deepening anger underlies most of the poems, beginning with memories of childhood and adolescence which rather than being moments of innocence, have become moments of not-yet knowing. Béliveau can no longer access these memories without going through the shock she is still experiencing, and which has displaced what she might have learned since her youth:
in my pocket a
shard of broken glass
fixes
everythings at fifteen years old
at forty you
receive a blow to the face
you no longer know
anything
and golden
cemeteries await us
dans ma poche un
bout de verre brisé
ça règle tout à quinze ans
à quarante on
reçoit un coup au visage
on ne connaît plus
rien
et les cimetières
dorés nous attendent (14)
Yet there are limits to this anger. The lack of titles and strong statements, together with the short lines that make up poems that are themselves relatively brief, all point to fatigue. Expressing anger then appears as a choice, as is letting exhaustion orient her response. In the “Three months post-op” section, anger seems to dominate: “the world could go right to hell” (le monde pourrait aller chier comme il faut, 68); “I lost my empathy / at the corner of King street and 13th avenue” (j’ai perdu mon empathie / au coin de la rue King et de la 13e avenue, 69). But anger is never the sole emotion: this seventh section ends with fear and the feeling that something remains hidden – and Béliveau struggles with the scarves she must wear and which appear in a sequence of poems as an obstructing extension of her being.
The titles of the last two sections play on the meanings of leave – to take leave of cancer, to be on leave from work. The emptiness of the post-cancer period is surrounded, cushioned, by the realization that life remains possible, one which Béliveau makes less and less futile efforts to seize. She learns to see herself anew through someone else’s eyes – the one who loves her, who continues to desire her, but also her “amazon,” another person who underwent a double mastectomy but chose to go without implants.
Together they learn to see themselves through one another: “our seams we showed / one another and me” (on s’est montré nos coutures / l’une et l’autre et moi, 70); “our scars we unveiled / told a story” (on s’est dévoilé nos cicatrices / raconté une histoire, 71). Only once the transformation is complete can Béliveau see herself without needing someone else’s gaze as mediation:
I was able to look
at myself without your eyes
a hundred and ten
bandages a hundred drains
before me a
creature that was not being born
this time it will have taken more than forceps
curled up clammy
trembling
she was
strong yelled at passersby
j’ai été capable
de me regarder sans tes yeux
cent dix
pansements cent drains
devant moi une
créature qui ne naissait pas
cette fois ça aura pris plus que des forceps
recroquevillée
moite tremblante
elle était
forte criait aux passants (99)
Comparisons of herself to a scavenger give way to metaphors of her and her partner as “benevolant predators / friends to the great cold / each at their window against absence / drawing great things / captive birds” (de bienveillants prédateurs / amis des grands froids / chacun à sa fenêtre contre l’absence / dessinant de grandes choses / oiseaux captifs, 84). In the very last section, analogical thinking seems less necessary, as Béliveau writes more directly about clear results from follow-up appointments and a new proximity to her partner. Pain remains, even though “nothing can prevent the we any longer” (plus rien ne peut empêcher le nous, 103).
Writing a book, of course, allows for another view altogether, far from those of those who people her life. Coming Béliveau, who now sees herself as a poet who practises medicine, a mention of the Québécoise poet Marie Uguay, despite its sobriety, marks the shadow that disease and death cast upon poetry. Uguay’s work remains on the whole to be translated (but see three poems in periodicities and the selected poems published by Guernica), but she is known among readers of poetry in Québec to have died of cancer at the age of 26, at the beginning of an already fruitful life of writing – while Béliveau, not that far later in life, was being treated for cancer around the time when she published what was only her first collection.
In spite of this explicit comparison, Béliveau only addresses the act of writing in her poems at the very end, as a way to acknowledge what she does to those she loves as she emerges from the anger, fear, and fatigue of the treatment. Writing seems to come after the fact, not as document but as yet another movement through the transformation, a way to complete it, to make herself visible not only to those she trusts, to herself, but to the world – irrevocably putting herself into the world. “I must write my being brought into the world” she concludes, “red like July” (je dois écrire ma mise au monde / rouge comme juillet, 105). These last words echo the line that gives the collection its title where she becomes a third person to herself. Here, like in the rest of the collection, she alternates between the direct and obvious, and the highly abstract and metaphorical. But in the writing, as opposed to the experience of cancer and the transformations it initiates, nothing is cloaked.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.